"With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black, cat-shaped holes in the universe."

-- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Just a Peek: Excerpts From My Journals

January 11, 2000 – 7:05PM

It’s a shame that nail
polish bottles are so small.Otherwise maybe the colors could have better names, like “five minutes
before sundown in a smog-infested city” and “jack-o-lantern in December”.

April 29, 2000 – 5:45PM

I
am at Eeyore’s Birthday Party.He
is 37 this year.

I
love this city.Earlier, I saw one
of the many dogs here bite one of the many puppies here on the nose.Apparently it looked bad to the owners
because various people studied and caressed the victim’s nose for some
time.He seemed slightly confused
but otherwise ok.The attacker’s
owner took a different approach.He bit his dog on the nose and asked him how that felt.I guess it was a lesson on treating
puppies the way you want to be treated.

I
love the costumes.I saw a
middle-aged unicorn smoking a while ago.And a scantily clad girl with a rooster on her shoulder.And a topless girl painted in
silver.And a yellow teletubby.

I
find it hard to believe that this began when some frat boys wanted to impress
their sorority girlfriends, but that’s how the story goes…

October 30, 2001 – 10:47PM

I have been wanting a
Tarot deck for some time now.Ever since I saw the selection at Book People, I have been interested in
getting one.But how to
choose?There were so many
different designs.I kept putting
it off because I wanted a deck that was really me.Well, the other night in Borders, I was
buying a new Austin map and while I was in line I saw a deck of Halloween Tarot
cards on the counter.(Yeah, it
was a total impulse buy.)So I
looked at them and noticed that every card had a black cat on it and they were
all Halloween designs.That sold
me.It seemed like the perfect
deck.Then, as if that wasn’t
enough, while I was doing a reading at home, I pulled up the “Devil” card to
find that the devil looked justlikeme in my costume this
year!It was so bizarre.Instead of the devil being some big
burly demon guy, it was a woman.She had long brown hair, and she was wearing a short tight blue dress,
blue elbow-length gloves, red fishnets, and black boots.Plus, of course, she had the horns,
tail, and pitchfork.Except for
the color of the gloves that was my exact costume.It really freaked me out.But it also told me I had made the right choice.I love my cards.

July 15, 2002 – 11:12PM

[Note:This was two days after moving into a
new apartment.]

Around 10PM I was
arranging my books on my various bookshelves.I wanted to put all of my Halloween/Tarot/Astrology books
together on the new little bookcase that I painted red.So I put all of them in there, but it
didn’t look right.After searching
through my poetry books and novels for more that fit the theme, it still was
not completely full, but I decided to leave the space thinking I might get more
Halloween-related books later to fill it up.Then I decided to take a break from books and work on
organizing my bedroom closet.While standing on a chair in my walk-in closet, I reached up to the
highest shelf, the one that I can’t even see it’s so high, and my hand landed
on… a book.I picked it up and
looked at it and got butterflies in my stomach.The title was The Good
Witch’s Guide to Wicked Ways and the inscription inside said, “Lexi—Maybe
we can brew up some spells for a fabu 2002!I love you sooo much.XOXO—Zalith”.(Or Zabith or
Zolith or Zobith, not sure.)It
creeped me out, in a good way.It
was like, “Man, I wish I had a new Halloween book.I think I’ll go look in my closet.Oh, here’s one!”I’m definitely keeping it, but I don’t know how much use I’ll get out of
it.The only spell I’ve read so
far is for “a more spiritual and tranquil cat” and involves me wearing a bag of
catnip and oregano around my neck for three days.

March 19, 2003 – 9:15PM

There is popcorn popping
in the microwave.The president is
on TV right now talking about the war that just started.There is a half-patched hole in my
bedroom ceiling where a man fell through it today.

[Note:Though I apparently did not write about
it in my journal, I later discovered that the roof worker who fell through my
ceiling while I was at work also brought with him the skeleton of a dead rat or
squirrel, which landed (somewhat appropriately) in the basket of cat toys below.]

July 14, 2004 – around 11:20AM

I have an announcement to
make.Christopher Lloyd is not
dead.Let me repeat, Christopher
Lloyd is not dead.It seems
that a year or two ago I was involved in an unfortunate miscommunication in the
lunch room at school when I heard (or thought I heard) another teacher (who was
reading the newspaper at the time) say that Christopher Lloyd had died.I was shocked and saddened that Doc
Brown was gone and told several people of the tragedy.Well, good news.Christopher Lloyd is not dead.He is alive, 66 years old, and will be
starring in a new TV show airing Tuesdays this fall.I apologize for spreading such an upsetting rumor.

January 14, 2006 – 10:28AM

“Under Covers”

Here I sit

In my PJ’s

Soaking in

Midmorning sun rays

Eclipsed in purple

Shrouded thickly

Some might think

That I am sickly

‘Tis not true

I’m well enough

It’s my idea

To surround in fluff

The day is mine

No work is destined

So though my habits

Some might question

I choose to spend

My hours in bed

Hot tea in hand

A book half-read

Three warm felines

Napping near me

Understand

My needs quite clearly

Together we gather

Our group of four

Caring not

What lies in store

Outside the window

People scurry

From one place

To next they hurry

For me a different

Path discovered

I’m spending my Saturday

Under covers

February 24, 2006 – 5:39PM

I fell down last
night.Yup.REALLY bit it on my living room floor.Flat on my back.If I was 40 years older, I would have
broken a hip.As it is, I just
bruised my pride a little (the left side mainly) and wrenched my neck so bad
that this morning I was paranoid that I had meningitis.I’m a dork.

June 18, 2008 – 11:02PM

If I am reading the label
correctly, my bottle of rubbing alcohol expired eleven years ago.Yeah.November 1997.Now, this disturbs me for various reasons.One, what happens to rubbing alcohol when it expires?What does that mean?Is it poisonous?Is it less alcoholic?More alcoholic?Will it infect my wound rather than
disinfecting it?All very
curious.But I think the bigger question
here is why I have been carrying around this bottle for eleven years???Think about it.This means that I’ve had this thing
since BEFORE 1997, which means I most likely acquired it in college.This means that I have packed up this
bottle and moved it at least FIVE
times, from the dorm to my apartment on Riverside, to my apartment in Tarrytown,
to my apartment on Bent Tree, to my OTHER apartment on Bent Tree, to my current
duplex.I mean, how many other
things in my house have been with me for eleven years?I’ve had that thing longer than my
cat.I guess I should throw it out
and buy a new bottle, right?That’s the sane thing to do, right?And yet it’s still in my bathroom cabinet as we speak…

November 6, 2009

Today I didn’t like my
boring beige knee socks, so I put blue, permanent marker polka dots on
them.But I did it while wearing
the socks and now I have blue polka dotted feet.

February 10, 2010 – 8:30PM

[Note:This was written just a few weeks
before I moved in with Mark, just three months before our wedding.]

I haven’t used it since
October or so.But tonight I am
packing and enjoying the fact that I called in sick for tomorrow (cough cough)
and I decided I needed to take a look at my future.Or really, my present.I asked the cards to tell me about my upcoming move and I shuffled them
and let Gink cut the deck, sort of.Read on for the shocking results.

“The Past” Card:

“You have had an eventful
past.You have borne trouble with
fortitude, but, unless you are careful, your future will be still more
eventful.”

(Not too bad.“Eventful” isn’t bad.)

“The Present” Card:

“You have made a
resolution to wed someone who is very wealthy and you will succeed in your
undertaking, but your future partner will regret it.”

(Um… ouch.)

“The Future” Card:

“Your friends will oppose
your prospective undertaking and try to persuade you from taking the important
step, but if you will be firm, all will end well.”

(Well, as long as it ends
well…)

“Love Matters” Card:

“The one you love is not
rich in money, but rich in love and if your married life is not a paradise on
earth, it will be because you are very hard to please.”

(You could sugar coat it
at least.)

“General Advice” Card:

“Never sing or play while
you are in company or when neighbors are at home, as it may have a tendency to
make them wish you lived in different parts.”

(Ok, the truth is the
truth.As long as my bad singing
won’t make my husband leave me, I’m fine.)

“Danger” Card:

“If you do not stop
flirting, it will deprive you of the love and esteem of one who loves you
sincerely and who is in a position to make you happy.So beware!”

(Yea, I kinda saw that
coming.Why weren’t the other
cards labeled DANGER too?Sheesh!)

August 28, 2010 – 9:55AM

Last night I was SOTIRED (“How tired were you?!”) that I couldn’t stay awake in my
dreams!In my dream about being at
meditative yoga and my dream about being at my friend Kristine’s house, I kept
falling asleep in my dream!Then I
had nightmares about a small panther and a bobcat chasing me trying to eat me
and then a very strange dream about playing mini-golf (which was really more
like bowling) with a blind guy in a wheelchair, but the ball was a cooked
potato and there were some really annoying cheerleaders in the way, one of whom
I hit in the belly with a small piece of potato and then got in trouble for it.

June 5, 2011 – 3:19PM

Wow…
my house is so dirty right now.I
mean really dirty.Whatever
you are picturing, it’s worse than that.Example:There are shoes on
my dining room table.Yeah.Shoes and piles of mail and some
tissues and some cat food and dirty dishes from yesterday and an empty Jamba
Juice cup from two days ago and a couple of books and a couple of journals and
a set of dominoes and a towel… And that’s just on my dining room table.

See,
my house always gets like this the last week of school.When summer looms just around the
corner, I get bold in my slothy-ness.Everything from doing laundry to doing dishes to throwing a dirty paper
towel into the trash can meets with the same response:“I’ll do it next week.”Maybe I’m revealing too much here, but
it’s true.I take care of the
necessities, such as bathing and clothing myself and feeding the cats, but the
rest… can wait.And the dirtier
and messier my house gets the more satisfying it is to clean it and get it back
in order when summer begins.My
M.O. used to be to drink a bunch of caffeine (most in the form of Starbucks
chai lattes), put on an old favorite movie or some classic Crazy Cousin Kelley
mix CDs and clean like a maniac until 3AM.

It
was awesome.

But
last year, for the first time, I had a husband (who still had to get up and go
to work) and I had to adapt my crazy cleaning mode to fit more reasonable
hours.It still got done though,
and if I remember correctly it was still pretty awesome.

But
THIS year, I still have a hubby who has to get up for work and I still
have a giant mess to clean, but I also have a puppy.A wonderful puppy who complicates matters a bit.A)He has helped to take the end-of-school messiness to a whole
new level (i.e. shoes on the dining room table) and B) he is not going
to let me go into crazy cleaning mode for 6 hours without needing my attention.Plus, he’ll probably just follow me
through the house messing up what I just cleaned anyway.So this could be interesting.

September 6, 2012 – 8:32AM

Yesterday
morning in the shower, I was singing “Calling You” by Blue October.You know, “I will keep CALLING YOU to
see, if you’re sleeping are you dreaming, if you’re dreaming are you dreaming
of me?”It’s a song that Mark put
on the first mix CD he gave me.And I decided that if Mark is ever in a coma, that’s the song I will
sing to him in his hospital bed to try to wake him up and bring him back to me.

And
then, I thought about what if I’m
the one in the coma?And I
realized that he should definitely sing that horrible horrible song “Brass in
Pocket” by The Pretenders, the one that goes, “Gonna use my FING-ERS!” because
I HATE that song and Mark constantly sings it just to make me mad and it
works every time.So if he sang
that to me when I was in a coma, I am fairly sure that I would wake up to slap
him.

But
last night, as I was lying in bed, hyped up on an Excedrin that I took too late
in the day, I realized how horrible it would be if I didn’t wake up, so
I told Mark, “Mark!This morning
in the shower I decided that if you’re ever in a coma, I’m going to sing
‘Calling You’ to you, and if I’m
ever in a coma, I want you to sing that horrible fingers song to me so it will
make me mad enough to wake up, but if I DON’T wake up in, like one minute, then
you havetosingsomethingelse!Something
sweet!Because that horrible
finger song CANNOT be the last thing I ever hear!So think of another song.Tomorrow.Please.”

2 comments:

Sorry it took me FOREVER to read this and, thus, comment upon it. I enjoy reading your blogs and so I try to pick a time where I won't rush through it on my way to play Tetris Battle on Facebook. Your journal entries are so much more interesting than mine! And, you know, you've filled more than one.....I love how all of your journals are pretty or quirky. I love that you drew dots on your legs accidentally. (pretty sure I did something similar)I wish we had been closer when we were younger (though I wasn't as cool when I was younger) so I could be your Silly Cousin Sarah or you could be my Cooky Cousin Carie but alas. I was not to be. Let's start now!Oh! and I have been thinking of getting Nutty Cousin Nate a Twin Peaks Tarot Deck from etsy.

Silly Cousin Sarah! I don't know why, but am only just NOW (almost a year later) seeing your comment. Thanks for the compliments on my journals. Trust me, not all the entries are gems-- there are plenty I'd embarrassed about. But if you write enough, there are bound to be a few that later make you smile. :)And yes, it is too bad we did not live closer as kids (Crazy Cousin Kelley, as you know, lived right next door) but I am glad that Facebook has allowed us to get to know each other better as "adults". Are we adults? :)

About Me

After teaching 7th grade for thirteen years, I hung up my overhead projector and started writing full time. My poems and short stories have appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar, Literary Juice, and other publications, and I am currently working on a novel. I have learned, however, that "working on a novel" can also look a lot like blogging, walking the dog, reading books, or even vacuuming the house. (It's a complicated process, to say the least.) I live in south Austin with my husband and pets.